A Life-Long Endeavour
by takingoffmyshoes
Summary: He never thought it would be easy, but that doesn't really make it better. (A companion piece to "I Myself am Heaven and Hell.")


_A/N: I don't think it's necessary to read the other one first, but this might make more sense if you do. The premise of both stories is that Solo has a history of heroin addiction and abuse, but while the first one deals with the usage, this one deals with the recovery. That doesn't mean it's a smooth ride, though, so please see the end notes for warnings._

* * *

 _"Recovery is a life-long endeavour, Mr Solo. Time alone isn't enough, but I've found that people can make all the difference."_

* * *

It's enough of a surprise that Waverly doesn't fire him.

It's even more of a surprise that Gaby and Illya are still willing to work with him.

But what absolutely, utterly blindsides him is that they pack their bags and go on leave with him, even though it's nowhere more exciting (or sunnier) than London.

Gaby, he can almost rationalize. She'd been shot, after all, and even though she has a head start on him, she'll still need some time to recover. Not four months of time, but some. Illya's decision would make more sense if he was still as furiously protective of Gaby as he had been immediately following the shooting, but during the course of Napoleon's luxurious (awful) four-week Malaysian hospital stay Illya had been nothing short of gentle with him, and his rage hasn't reappeared since.

(He more than half expected it to. Gaby was _shot_ , after all, and Napoleon made his uneasy peace long ago with the knowledge that, of the two of them, Illya will choose Gaby over him every time. It's simply the nature of the game – not his to wonder why, and all that. But no; even after Napoleon somehow (miraculously) didn't die (stay dead), Illya remained just as stubbornly patient and soft-edged with him. It's almost annoying, really. _Really_.)

But go on leave with him they do – for all four months, no less – and piece by piece they begin to put themselves back together.

* * *

Needless to say, there are... complications.

He never expected it to be easy.

He hasn't been entirely, fully, pristinely clean in nearly two decades, so of course there are going to be problems, of course there are going to be bad days, of course there are going to be urges and cravings and the slow insidious burning of _want_ under his skin. Of course there will be restlessness and depression, distraction and near-manic focus, a reckless catastrophe of broken desires and impossible promises. Of _course_ it won't be easy. It never has been.

But somewhere, in the most naive and stupidly hopeful corners of his mind, he'd believed that _knowing_ it won't be easy would make the difficulty more bearable.

It doesn't.

Surprise.

—O—

The first two months of his mandatory leave go something like this:

He surrounds himself with people who want to help him fix himself, and he ignores them.

It's not that he tries to, or even that he wants to, it's just that all the advice and support they have to offer was designed for someone else, someone who actually has a chance of getting better and moving on.

He's not going to get better. He can't move on. He knows this, just like he knows he's a liar and a thief and an insubstantial projection of the eyes of his beholders. He's trying, god help him, but how can he simply pack up sixteen years of sordid, shameful, essential history and pretend that it isn't a cornerstone of his being? How can he ignore everything it's done to him, everything it's done _for_ him, and remove himself from the only reality he trusts?

There's a sharp rap on his door, and he recognizes the sound of Gaby's fine but lethally pointy knuckles.

"It's open," he says, and the words sound heavy and muted even to his own ears.

The telltale creak as the door swings open on aging hinges, and a faint brightening of the room. He entertains the thought of rolling over to greet her, but his body doesn't obey.

"Counseling didn't go well today, then," she says eventually.

"I cancelled," he tells his pillow, and Gaby sighs.

"You know you're not supposed to do that." That's almost enough to make him laugh. Or it would be, if the notion weren't physically painful.

"Add it to the list," he says instead. "It's already long enough – one more shouldn't make a difference." _Things Napoleon Solo Isn't Supposed To Do But Does Anyway_ , item 179. He probably isn't supposed to keep a list in the first place. _Item 180._ All the way at the top, of course, somewhere between items 1 and 3, is _get addicted to heroin_. Check. Did that.

"Napoleon," Gaby says softly, and that's how he knows he's in trouble. Gaby doesn't use his name unless she feels bad for him. _Item 181: convince Gaby to pity him._ She's silent for a while, chewing on her words. "Do you want something to eat?" she asks at last. "It doesn't look like you've had anything yet today."

She's a sharp one. No wonder Waverly made her a spy.

"No."

"I'll bring you something." It sounds like a warning. The door doesn't slam when she leaves, though, and he's pathetically grateful. The impact would probably have shattered him.

—O—

It's not always like that, of course. Sometimes he throws things. Sometimes he drinks. Sometimes he takes off his tie and wraps it cruelly, thrillingly tight around his upper arm, desperately chasing that heady, dangerous sensation. Sometimes Gaby and Illya wrestle him into his coat and scarf and take him for forced marches along the city streets.

There are good days, too, when Napoleon goes to his appointments and eats regular meals and annoys Illya and sees something other than failure and death in his future, but those days are hard to come by and harder to trust. They leave such a bitter taste in his mouth the next time he falls.

—O—

The most pressing concern is the ever-present itch lurking just beneath his consciousness. Enforced leave is a wonderful idea except for the fact that it leaves him painfully short of distractions, and so he has to invent his own. His appointments only take up so much time, after all, and Gaby and Illya are frequently coming and going on errands and other business. (He's supposed to be "focusing on himself," which is, by a conservative estimate, roughly nine tenths of the problem.)

Some of his methods are better than others. Cold water has been on the books for almost as long as he's been using, and ice is even more effective. Drinking to quell another addiction is outright dangerous, he's told, but he does it anyway (item 6). If he trusted himself enough to go into the city alone he would, but he doesn't. There's too much temptation there, too much possibility of failure.

Gaby and Illya do what they can to help when they're around, which to be fair is more often than not. They're very rarely gone at the same time, but it happens, and – embarrassingly – it somehow always goes badly for him. It galls him that all of a sudden, after years and years of proficiency in solitude, he is incapable of functioning alone. He tries to not think about it, but it's impossible.

The first time they were both gone at once, he'd cancelled his appointment without even trying to get out of bed first.

This time, Illya comes back to find him in the bathroom, holding a straight razor and eyeing it with a little too much contemplative intention. He goes abruptly, furiously pale and does something to Napoleon's wrist that makes him drop the blade before he even realizes that he's moved.

"Don't," Illya says, low and harsh.

Napoleon actually looks at him then, and sees the wide eyes and shaking hands and reads fear rather than fury.

"I wasn't going to do anything," he says. It comes out far more defensive and far less insouciant than he'd intended. The unspoken addendum rings loud in the silence between them. _Not this time_ , they both hear, and Illya – bless him – looks terrified for the first time in living memory.

He leads Napoleon out of the bathroom by the wrist he still holds clenched in one bruisingly strong hand, but then he brings him into the apartment's laughable excuse for a sitting room, presses him down into a wingback armchair, straddles his lap, and kisses him breathless. It proves an ample distraction from thoughts of release of a darker nature, and when Gaby comes back a scant half hour later, they're still both fully clothed and exactly where they started, which is nothing short of a miracle. Illya doesn't startle at the sound of the door opening, just pulls away to look up, and the broken, almost pleading look on his face as he seeks out Gaby's forgiveness, her permission, her _help_ — It's almost, _almost_ enough to make Napoleon regret the last twenty-five minutes.

But all he hears is a muttered 'finally,' and Illya actually smiles before taking Napoleon's face between his hands and getting back to work with a gentleness and devotion that should be reserved for something fragile, something precious, something – someone – Napoleon's not.

It's been entirely too long since Illya's kissed him like this, though, and so he gives in and lets himself believe for a moment that he deserves it.

—O—

If this were a fairy tale, that night would fix him. They make him feel whole, these two ridiculous people, whole in a way he'd long since giving up on feeling. It seems like forever since he's kissed Gaby, too (or, more accurately, since she's kissed him) and he's missed the feel of her hair against his palm, the softness of her skin, still largely unmarred.

Later, when they're tangled together in the soft, dark space before sleep, he runs his fingers over the puckered star of scar tissue on her ribs, still just barely on the right side of vivid. She'll carry that scar for the rest of her life, and she's damn lucky because it could have been so much worse.

"Not your fault," Gaby murmurs drowsily, but not before catching his hand and moving it higher, settling it against the steady beat of her heart.

"Not your fault," Illya agrees, somehow managing to sound grumpy even after everything. "Now sleep."

And if this were a fairy tale, that would be enough. But it's not a fairy tale, and Napoleon wakes up the next morning drowning in shame.

This is why he can't trust the good days.

—O—

It's never been this bad before. Never. He's never felt so flayed, so exposed, so dependent, so ashamed. He managed the habit for years – decades, almost – without once suffering such abject despair.

He blames the counseling. The third month is crawling into view, and all the sessions have done so far is absolutely destroy his already tenuous connections to reality.

His every assumption, conviction, and belief about himself and his world is being dragged out of him and deconstructed with surgical precision. His every logical fallacy and tactical misstep is dismantled in front of him, leaving behind gaping nothingness where once was an unshakable faith in his own ability. He is told, essentially, that in order to move on he must start over, rebuilding himself from the ground up until he can stand unaided by the promise of another hit.

It's not unlike the fading rush of adrenaline that leaves behind a ragged wound and no ability to treat it.

"I always knew it would destroy me," he says over dinner one night. It had been a nightmarish day from start to finish, and Gaby and Illya are practically bribing him to try to get him to eat. "And now I have to try to stop it." His fork clatters against the table, and his untasted dinner leers up at him. "I don't know how."

He's so tired. So tired of fighting this unwinnable war. He'd known from the moment the first needle slid under his skin that it would kill him one day, and even at his most careful and controlled, he'd never questioned it. He just kept using, again and again, because it was worth his life. Every hit was worth it, every single one, because his life became meaningless the second he gave in.

"I can't do this."

This might actually be the first time those words have ever come out of his mouth, but he's distracted from the historic moment by the sudden weight of Gaby's arms around him. She's deceptively strong, their East German chop shop girl. She always has been.

"You _can_ ," she whispers fiercely. "You can, Napoleon, you can. You're doing so well, and we're so proud of you. Whatever you need, we'll get it for you, we'll do it for you, just _fight_." Her arms tighten even further, and surely that's the reason he suddenly feels choked.

"I'm trying," he says, but even he doesn't believe that anymore, so why should she?

But across the table, Illya meets his gaze, and he sees the heaviness of his own body in the slope of Illya's shoulders, sees the crumpling of his own façade in the lines around Illya's eyes, and sees his own exhaustion staring back at him. "We know," he says quietly. "We know."

—O—

They keep in touch with Waverly during their leave, and Gaby must have made some calls and pulled some strings because Waverly extends his leave by another month. "I'm in no rush, Mr Solo," he says over the phone. "The most important thing to me right now is that you get well." There's far too much honest concern in his voice, and so Napoleon hangs up.

 _Get well_. As though he were suffering some grave illness rather than a mere failing of character.

 _Get well_. Ha. He gave up being well sixteen years ago.

—O—

It's just his damned luck that he actually does get sick not long after that conversation. It's hardly surprising: he's not eating enough, he's not sleeping enough, and every day he feels another inch of himself fraying. It's only a matter of time before he goes insane or gets high.

Fortunately, the realization of that ultimatum gets delayed by the fact that it's March in London and somehow he gets honest-to-God influenza. He spends a week in bed with a fever of a hundred and three and his birthday passes without notice. He's never felt more like an Austen character in his entire life.

Illya spends most of the week with him, stretched out with a book on the half of the bed that Napoleon isn't currently languishing in. "You'll get sick," Napoleon had croaked at him the first time he'd sat down there. Illya hadn't even looked at him, just turned the page and said, "Russians don't get sick."

That's a complete lie, of course, but Napoleon was too busy being feverish and miserable to argue. He stays feverish and miserable for a long damn time – too long, in his professional opinion – which is actually rather exciting because it distracts him from the looming awareness of his impending fall.

And then he sort of loses track of everything anyway because he spends a week in bed with a fever of a hundred and three, but then he spends two days in St. Bart's with an IV line in the back of his hand and a couple of glowering international spies next to his hospital bed.

When he wakes up to find that the ceiling has definitely changed since he fell asleep last night, he's met with the sight of an unusually rumpled Illya leaning forward and very deliberately picking up his needle-free hand. His eyes are murderous, but also very lovely. This is probably not the best time for that particular thought, given that Illya looks like he's about a minute away from destroying a room, but he's always been willing to take risks for beautiful things. " _Fight harder_ ," Illya growls, eyes icy and hard, and yes, that is actual anger. Interesting.

There are too many questions circling around in his head to pick one and voice it, so all he says is, "Why."

"Because we need you," Illya says, sounding almost as raw as he had all those weeks ago in a hospital in Kuala Lumpur. "If you give up on yourself, you give up on us. Don't give up on us, Cowboy. Don't you dare. I know it is hard," he goes on, voice breaking just a bit, just a hairline crack, but it floods Napoleon with a strange and nameless grief. "I know it hurts, but you must find a way to live with it, or it will kill you."

"I don't know what's real anymore, Peril," he breathes. "How do I live with that?"

Abruptly, Illya sits back in his chair. "Everything is still real," he says, tired. "Go to back to sleep, Solo."

He does, because he's tired, and really still quite sick. The fever doesn't break until the second night, and the hours leading up to it are increasingly stifling and surreal. At some point he hallucinates Waverly, which is just poor taste. He doesn't say anything, only stands there and stares into Napoleon's soul until he vanishes between one blink and the next. It's very odd, particularly because Napoleon doesn't personally believe in souls, let alone his own.

Gaby and Illya appear next, but he's fairly sure they're real because they've been here before, when he was more lucid. "They said the fever should break soon," Gaby says, running her fingers through his hair. She sounds very far away, and he feels like he's moving, rising and falling with the deck of a ship at sea. "And then you'll start feeling better."

"Wonderful," he mutters. "Because this is starting to get tiresome." And then he passes out and sleeps for twelve hours.

—O—

The good thing about nearly dying of influenza ("You did not 'nearly die,' Cowboy") is that it leaves him with absolutely no energy for existential crises. It doesn't leave him with much energy for anything else, but it's rather a relief to not be worrying about whether or not he's lying to himself at any given moment, or whether or not he deserves to be alive, or how he's going to make it through the next day despite the crawling in his bones and the turmoil of his mind, and then the next day, and the next, and the next, and the next, until he fails or dies.

The only thing he concerns himself with for the next several days is doing what Gaby and Illya tell him to. If they bring water, he drinks it. If they bring food, he eats it. If they tell him to sleep, he obliges. When Illya scrapes him out of bed and strips them both and manhandles him into the shower, he doesn't fight it, just lets Illya prop him up as he performs the incredibly labor-intensive ritual of washing his hair.

"Would Gaby shave my head if I asked her to?" he asks without thinking the third time that he has to lower his arms to take a break.

"Yes," Illya says shortly, "so do not ask." There's a smile in his voice, though, and he takes over the washing after that.

—O—

He starts going back to his appointments the next Monday. He looks slightly awful and knows it, but he'd rather not drop another small fortune on a new wardrobe just yet, so it will simply have to be a little loose until he can fill it out again.

"I must say I've grown quite tired of these exercises in Cartesian doubt," he says when he sits down. "Do we have anything more lighthearted on the menu?"

His counselor, a petite and flinty-eyed woman of indeterminate age, merely raises her eyebrows and gestures for him to continue.

He settles into his chair. "The criteria for returning to fieldwork, for example."

She doesn't exactly laugh in his face, but it's a near thing. He knows he's still a shattered mosaic of a man, knows it better than anyone else. But he also knows that he's spent sixteen years making this problem, and expecting to resolve it in a matter of months had been nothing but foolhardy optimism. It will take much, much longer to put himself back together, but he can't do it in a vacuum.

He returns to the apartment almost two hours later, announces that he's all right but needs to think, and shuts himself in his room to do just that.

He sits down with his experiences, his convictions, his ideas, and his intentions. He takes them out one by one, holds them up to the light and examines them for cracks, and spreads them out before him. Piece by piece, he starts to fit himself back into the world.

When Illya calls him out for dinner, his hair is only marginally more rumpled than his shirt, and there's a good chance he's given himself wrinkles just from rubbing at his face, but he feels like he's finally taken a step forward instead of back.

"Better?" Gaby asks as she piles potatoes onto his plate.

"You know," he says slowly, feeling out the truth of the answer, "I actually think so."

—O—

It's the fourth month, and the counseling is finally starting to put him back together instead of ripping him apart.

It's still hard.

He still has good days and bad days, but the good days are less fickle, and the bad days are less overwhelming.

He starts going out alone again, but he's cautious, and he knows that one or both of his partners will be tailing him. He visits the gardens and parks first, thinking them relatively safe, then branches out to museums, and finally to shops. His fingers itch with desire, but his feet don't turn him towards any of the numerous alleys, tube stations, or businesses that will sell him what he craves.

Slowly, he starts to trust himself again.

—O—

"Dance with me," he says to Gaby when the craving starts to stir beneath his skin.

"Give me something to do," he says to Illya, when he's irritable and twitchy and his fingers ache with the urge to tear at his skin and break themselves and let out the demons seething in his blood.

Gaby builds up a collection of records, slow and sensual music that distracts him quite well indeed. (It distracts all of them, but such distraction does everyone copious amounts of good in the end.)

Illya buys him an intricate little puzzle box, so fine and detailed that he has to massage the ache out of his fingers before he can even start to manipulate it. It's not hard to figure out, but it requires deft touches and careful concentration to actually open it, and it's precisely what he needs.

It's the fourth month, and he's eating better, sleeping better. The weight he lost to the flu hardly compares to the weight he lost in Malaysia, and he hadn't done much to get that back in the intervening months. It will take time, but he's getting stronger, healthier, one day at a time.

—O—

It's the fifth month, and it's still hard.

Gaby and Illya are getting restless, but he can't complain because so is he.

They're still patient with him, still the calm in the center of his storm. He doesn't deserve them, but that thought doesn't send him hurtling into labyrinths of doubt and despair anymore. It's just a fact. They disagree, and that's fine by him.

It's six months to the day since Gaby was shot, and Napoleon dresses up in his best suit and most ridiculous apron to bring her breakfast in bed. She laughs delightedly, then relieves him of most of his clothing so that he can join them in bed to eat. Illya produces the awful orange slippers he bought for her when she was in the hospital, and they spend the day in lazy good cheer, celebrating another victory over the hazards of their profession.

It's six months to the day since Napoleon overdosed, and Illya keeps him in bed all morning, running his hands and lips over every scar, track mark, and imperfection he can find, lavishing worshipful attention on everything that makes Napoleon human. Gaby takes him to bed in the evening, and fucks him hard and angry for all the worry and fear he caused them, and he loves every second of it.

It's the last day of the five months, and Napoleon cooks them an extravagant dinner to mark the occasion. Tomorrow, he will go back to work, and he's only a little bit terrified.

* * *

The world goes on much as it did before, which is to say chaotic and uncaring. There are stumbling blocks along the way, some of which he avoids and some of which he does not.

There's a knife in his back in India, and he endures the crude surgery awake and fully cognizant, since the only pain medication the clinic stocks is opium.

There's a human trafficking ring in Belgium that they investigate a little too closely, and Illya breaks out of his restraints like they're tissue paper when their captor approaches Napoleon with a syringe full of something dangling between his fingers. He snaps the man's neck with one savage twist before getting Napoleon out of his own bindings. "A little extreme, don't you think?" Napoleon asks lightly, even though he's almost dizzy with relief. "It could have been anything, you know."

"Precisely," Illya says darkly, and stalks out of their cell to go liberate the rest of the victims.

There's an heiress with dangerous tastes in Australia, and he goes undercover as her dealer. The mission take a toll on him, but he manages to save her in the end. From an assassination attempt, that is. He's still trying to save himself from the drugs; he doubts he has room to save anyone else yet.

And then there's Poland, where he wakes up in a safe house with a thick head and aches in every inch of him. There are blankets pulled up around his shoulders, pillows propping him up at an angle, and a tall Russian agent hunched over, elbows on knees, in a chair next to the bed. There is also a horribly, horribly familiar feeling of heaviness in his limbs and his head.

"Illya," he says. It sounds – and feels – like sandpaper in his throat, but Illya sits up sharply at the sound. "Illya," he says again, fear rising in his throat. He tries to push himself up, only to be met with a hand on his shoulder, holding him down against the pillows.

"Nyet," Illya says softly. "Don't."

"Please tell me this isn't what I think it is," he says, hating how small and broken his voice is but unable to help it. "Please tell me I didn't—"

"No," Illya says sharply. "It wasn't you. They kept you sedated once they took you. Morphine, for three days. I'm sorry. It shouldn't have taken so long."

So it could be worse, but it's still going to be awful. He'll deal with that later. "Where's Gaby?"

"Wreaking havoc," Illya answers promptly. "She should be back soon."

These ridiculous, ridiculous people. He loves them, he really does.

"Any other damages I should know about?"

Illya hesitates. "There was a safe," he says at last, and Napoleon groans theatrically. He feels awful, but the thought of Illya blowing a perfectly good safe is even worse.

"I can't believe I associate with you," he grumbles, and Illya cracks a smile.

"Go to sleep, Cowboy," he says fondly.

New aches and pains are coming to light – the sharp twinge that speaks of broken ribs, the tightness in his shoulders, the dull throb of recently set fingers – so Illya's suggestion has its merits, but there's something he needs to do first.

"Come here," he says, and Illya obligingly leans over. Napoleon reaches up with what he judges to be the least damaged hand and draws Illya's face even closer. "Thank you," he murmurs, and kisses him. "I don't think I've said that yet."

"You just woke up," Illya points out, just as softly.

"For everything, you thick-headed Russian. Not just today."

"Ah, well then." Illya kisses him this time, sweet and gentle. "You are welcome."

"Tell Gaby to wake me up when she gets back, would you? I haven't thanked her yet, either."

"And Waverly?" Illya asks, teasing.

"You leave Waverly out of this," Napoleon tells him, "unless you want to share."

Illya hums. "No," he decides. "I think not."

"Good choice."

—O—

It's been a year, and it's still hard. There are still good days and bad days, and missions that go well and missions that don't.

He's not entirely well, and he probably never will be. But he's better, and at the end of the day, it's enough for him.

* * *

 _ **WARNINGS**_ _:_

 _Frequent references to past heroin addiction and abuse. Depressive episodes, self-loathing, feelings of hopelessness, and distrust of one's own perception of reality. Unhealthy coping mechanisms, including drinking and contemplation of self-harm by cutting._

 _Thanks for reading! As always, please feel free to leave feedback, point out mistakes, suggest better/different warnings, ask questions, etc._


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